The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry.

  Whatever added to the sum and aggregate of human happiness, considered Bentham, was in itself justifiable, as quantity was more worthy of consideration than quality. This remains a challenging proposition.

  Despite studying Utilitarianism with some interest at Cambridge, under the heading of ‘The English Moralists’ (a miscellaneous grouping that included Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Marx), I’ve never been quite sure what kind of a game push-pin is, and am relieved to see frustrated dissension on this point expressed on the internet, some of it under the eloquent heading, ‘What the fuck is pushpin?’ It’s amazing how much the student mind can glide over without stopping to query – the Royal Game of the Goose, the twelve good rules, nine men’s morris, push-pin, jigsaws in Mansfield Park. I never bothered to get to grips with any of them. But it’s never too late to learn. The OED defines push-pin as ‘A child’s game, in which each player pushes or fillips his pin with the object of crossing that of another player’ and gives examples from Shakespeare, Herrick, Marvell and Cowper, which leave me none the wiser. What kind of pins? Pins as in ten-pin bowling? Pins as in the pins stuck into Alison Uttley’s sacred pincushion? Or pins as in spillikins?

  My husband has always thought it was a game somewhat like shove ha’penny. But I don’t know what shove ha’penny is either. Is it a kind of pitch-and-toss? And what, please, is pitch-and-toss?

  The antiquarian and engraver Joseph Strutt, in his classic compendium titled The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), is as dismissive as he is unhelpful. All that he has to say is that ‘Push-pin is a very silly sport, being nothing more than simply pushing one pin across another.’

  My grandchildren liked that game in the Minehead arcades when you tried to make pennies fall over a shelf, in a cascading copper waterfall. They could teeter on the brink impossibly, banking up, and then suddenly, orgasmically, they would let themselves go. I liked that game too. We used to play it in Filey when we were children. It’s very silly, but it’s fun.

  Jane Austen, we are told in A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) by her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh, was good at spillikins. Nobody could throw them with as steady a hand as she, and her performances with cup and ball were marvellous. ‘The one used at Chawton was an easy one, and she has been known to catch it on the point above an hundred times in succession, until her hand was weary. Sometimes she found a resource in that simple game when unable, from weakness in her eyes, to read or write long together.’

  That’s what novelists do when they need a break. They play solitaire, or free cell, or do a bit of a jigsaw, or play cup and ball.

  Jane Austen was an affectionate and patient aunt. She wrote to her sister on 24 October 1808 from Southampton, as she tried to divert her nephews Edward and George from grieving for the death of their mother: ‘We do not want amusement; bilbocatch [‘biloboquet’, i.e. cup and ball], at which George is indefatigable, spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the ebb and the flow of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed.’ This is a sad testimony to her brave efforts to amuse the little motherless boys.

  Those who read books tend to despise those who don’t. My mother disapproved very strongly of homes without books, and those for whom the word ‘book’ meant ‘magazine’. (Though it has to be said that she herself had subscriptions to Woman and Good Housekeeping, and for me one of the first indulgences of returning from boarding school for the holidays was the pleasure of going through a thick pile of carefully saved back numbers. I particularly loved the agony column of Evelyn Home, and to my surprise have discovered that in real life she was a Quaker called Peggy Makins.) Francis Spufford, in The Child that Books Built (2002), an account of his childhood reading, states: ‘I have a cultural sanction for my addiction. Books get cited over and over as the virtuous term whose wicked other half is Nintendo, or MTV, or the Web.’ But those who read his story to the end will discover that he agrees with Bentham that reading is not necessarily innocent, for his addiction led him into pornography, a journey he appears to regret.

  Disapproval of card games is traditional and comes in various degrees of intensity. Mary Delany’s objections were measured; she wrote: ‘I am not so great an enemy to cards as to be uneasy at them, but I would not make it my business to secure company for that purpose.’ Caroline Lennox, who cultivated the life of the mind, couldn’t resist cards and gambling, but felt uncomfortable about it: ‘I can’t help when I play deep having an unpleasant feel about it, as if I did something wrong; perhaps a little vanity at not acting consistent with the rest of one’s character. In short, I don’t quite know, but tho’ I love it I don’t feel pleasant at it.’ Lady Mary Coke, in contrast, had no such scruples. She played regularly, often at court, tediously and painstakingly recording in her journal each evening’s losses and gains; these were usually in the region of seven or eight guineas, though sometimes they were very much higher. Jane Austen (in a letter to her sister Cassandra, dated 7 October 1808) records being ‘tricked’ into playing commerce with friends in Southampton for a three-shilling stake, but at that rate she could not play more than one pool, as she ‘could not afford to lose that, twice in an evening’. (Lady Mary balanced her persistent gambling with some healthy hands-on gardening, which has not yet been considered a debauched activity.)

  Card games were endemic in aristocratic circles in the eighteenth century. How else could leisure time be passed? Innumerable group and family portraits record their subjects playing cards, and often without any hint of satire, though sometimes criticism may be intended, and art historians are always searching for it. A few rakes played for high stakes, losing thousands of pounds in an evening. Others played to alleviate boredom. The diarist John Hervey gives a chilling glimpse of life under George II, on the night of the birth in 1737 of the ‘poor little ugly she-mouse’ of a daughter of the Princess of Wales. Unaware of the turn of events, at Hampton Court

  the King played at commerce below stairs, the queen above at quadrille, the Princess Emily at her commerce-table, and the Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey at cribbage, just as usual, and separated all at ten of the clock; and, what is incredible to relate, went to bed all at eleven, without hearing one syllable of the Princess’s being ill, or even of her not being in the house.

  That phrase, ‘just as usual’, is deadly.

  Decades later, nothing much had changed. George III’s daughter Princess Elizabeth, born in 1770, and pining for a husband as she felt her beauty fade, wrote in despair in 1802 from the regular family holiday in Weymouth to her confidante Lady Harcourt:

  Read to the Queen the whole evening till cards, when I play at whist till my eyes know not hearts from diamonds and spades from clubs. And when that is over, turn over cards to amuse the King, till I literally get the rheumatism in every joint of my hand…News there is none, but who bathes and who can’t, and who won’t and who will, whether warm bathing is better than cold, who likes wind and who don’t, and all these very silly questions and answers which bore one to death and provoke one’s understanding.

  The bad example set by some of the royals, and notably by the Prince Regent himself, was in part responsible for the evangelical revolt against loose living and high stakes. Jane Austen’s disapproval of the amateur theatricals in Mansfield Park is taken as a significant marker in this shift towards propriety, for, in her high-spirited girlhood, there had been little sign of such censoriousness. But her reservations about the tone of the amusements at Mansfield Park were mild compared with the condemnations of Mrs Sherwood, the autocrat of the nursery and the author of the best-selling and much reprinted History of the Fairchil
d Family (3 volumes, 1818, 1842, 1847). Mrs Sherwood (born Mary Butt) denounced card games with evangelical intensity, and in her memoirs she luridly describes the small-town life of her grandparents’ generation in Coventry and Lichfield as bedevilled by raucous card parties. The ladies, she said,

  always played for money, and often quarrelled so violently over their cards as actually to proceed to pulling of caps…It was astonishing how fifty or sixty years ago this mode of spending the evenings prevailed among the ladies in towns. As the market and the church filled up in the morning, so did cards occupy almost every evening of females in a certain class.

  This doesn’t sound quite like the dull royal evenings, or like the peaceful games of cribbage, piquet, speculation, quadrille and vingt-et-un enjoyed by the county families in Jane Austen’s novels, though it is true that the vulgar Mrs Philips in Pride and Prejudice enjoyed ‘a noisy game of lottery tickets’ with her nieces, and ‘a little bit of hot supper afterwards’, and we see the more refined characters in Sense and Sensibility recoil from the noisiness of a game of consequences.

  Playing for money was, as Mrs Sherwood says, considered normal. Harriet Martineau, who was born into a religious Huguenot family in Norwich, and who was herself as a child of a neurotically religious persuasion, records the pleasure of winning at cards without a hint of self-reproach, although she was by nature of a disapproving temperament: she disapproved of women writers who sustained themselves with alcohol when working late, and she disapproved of Mary Wollstonecraft because she succumbed to sexual passion. But playing cards did not carry an odour of sin.

  The Wordsworths played cards at Dove Cottage, when they weren’t reading Chaucer or Shakespeare to one another. But I don’t think they played for money. The Coleridge children did jigsaws, but I don’t know whether the Wordsworths did.

  Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, set in the 1840s and early 1850s, also records without any note of censure the continuing prevalence of cards, although Gaskell was the wife of a minister (albeit a tolerant Unitarian one). The ladies of Cranford play ‘the decorous, highly respectable game of Preference’ regularly, nearly every evening, with passion and commitment, gulping down their tea in order to get at the game more quickly. ‘Cards were a business in those days, not a recreation.’ They played for threepenny points (these would have been little silver threepenny coins), and it was customary for each player to contribute a shilling towards the expense of each new pack of cards, placing the coin discreetly under one of the candlesticks as the green-baize tables were laid out for the game. Gaskell does not hint at any rowdiness or impropriety at these gatherings, and the gentle ladies of Cranford certainly did not indulge in the pulling of caps, though occasionally ‘a few squibs and crackers’ were let off at the end of the evening at careless or unlucky partners. All the ladies, we are assured, were in bed and asleep by ten.

  Elizabeth Gaskell smiled on the quiet amusements of her townswomen, who learned to fill their empty and impoverished days with harmless and mutually supportive activities – paying morning calls, knitting garters, talking about the London fashions, making candle-lighters (known to Miss Matty in Cranford and to us at Bryn as ‘spills’) from coloured paper, and embroidering Queen Adelaide’s face in loyal wool-work.

  Auntie Phyl taught us how to make spills by making little twists from old newspapers. We used them to light the little paraffin Kelly lamps that saw us to bed before electricity reached Long Bennington. I enjoyed this thrifty and simple activity of recycling. We kept the spills in a pot on the mantelpiece.

  Elizabeth Gaskell had an affectionate temperament and an easy tolerance of eccentricities. She was fond of her old ladies, and writes about their small world with confident indulgence, while eschewing the sentimentality that often afflicted the prose of Mary Russell Mitford, her contemporary and a fellow chronicler of country ways. Mitford’s Our Village, which provides a close parallel and an interesting comparison with Cranford, is a little overloaded with apple cheeks and dimpled faces and sparkling eyes and primroses and cowslips and hollyhocks and carnations and mossy dells and elves and fairies. The words ‘delicious’ and ‘beautiful’ are sprinkled too lavishly on the page, and even her admirers admitted that she enamelled too brightly. Her violets are too violet, her bluebells too blue. She was an ardent rambler and gardener, and her garden at Three Mile Cross, near Reading, was her solace for the hardships of a life that had, in fact, been thrown off course and nearly ruined by her father’s gambling. Dr George Mitford (the professional title was largely honorary) was all too fond of cards. He had managed to get through a large fortune of some £70,000, which he lost on whist, piquet, speculation and greyhounds, playing for much higher stakes than the Cranford ladies, and his daughter had to write hard and fast to save him from his creditors and the King’s Bench Prison. She might well have taken to speculation herself, for in 1797 at the age of ten, with a beginner’s luck, she had personally selected a winning number in the Irish Lottery; she chose 2224, because the digits added up to ten, and the ticket won her £20,000. Her father got through that, as well as his own and his wife’s inheritance, thus consigning his daughter to a life of scribbling. She gave up betting, and took up writing and gardening. He went on betting.

  Most of Mary Russell Mitford’s nineteenth-century prose sketches would translate easily into twentieth-century Heritage jigsaws. When South Africa-born novelist Barbara Trapido in Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) describes a house in Sussex as being ‘like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. The kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from measles’, she could be describing many of the dwellings described by Mitford or painted by Helen Paterson Allingham – images of archetypal, timeless, modest, rural tranquillity, still faithfully reproduced and sold in village shops in the third millennium, despite the advent of more upmarket art jigsaws.

  When Mitford was writing about her universal village for the Lady’s Magazine, she seems conscious, like Gaskell in Cranford, of describing a vanishing Golden Age (and one that would vanish all the more rapidly if others were to continue to uproot and replant wild flowers as vigorously and profligately as she). Does the brightly coloured jigsaw box cast a shadow and a question over what was or was not the Real Thing? Elizabeth Gaskell solved this problem with exceptional tact and grace in Cranford and Cousin Phillis, where the lament for a passing way of life is securely placed in a context of inevitable progress and change, but Mitford, writing to stay afloat (and writing village sketches because they paid better than the poetry, tragedies and historical dramas that she had considered her true métier), was pushed (like Alison Uttley, though for different reasons) into some kind of falsity of sweetness that strikes us uneasily now. She wrote for the market. It was her father’s fault.

  Helen Allingham (a family connection of Mrs Gaskell) also painted for the market, to support her ailing husband and her three children; her watercolours of Surrey cottages were for some years very popular, although they went out of fashion during her lifetime. But they lived on as jigsaws in the 1920s and 30s, enjoyed in an age when urban sprawl was destroying some of her subjects and vastly inflating the prices of others.

  Mrs Sherwood would have disapproved intensely of Dr Mitford and his gambling, if not of his daughter’s filial loyalty. She was by nature evangelical, censorious and dogmatic, and maybe her descriptions of the card parties of her grandparents’ era are exaggerated. Yet her popular The History of the Fairchild Family is not an austere work, and it strikes a more lurid note than the cool, enlightened and rational tales of her contemporary Maria Edgeworth. Mrs Sherwood’s stories were popular with children not for their moral lessons and interpolated hymns and prayers, but for their sadism and gluttony. They are packed with racy descriptions of childish naughtiness, violent retribution and sudden death, accompanied by tempting descriptions of roast fowls, venison, currant-and-raspberry pies, buttered toast and damascene plums. It is a rich and unwholesome mixture. />
  Children like unpleasant stories, and I was very fond of (though rather frightened by) some punitive tales called The Misfortunes of Sophy (Les Malheurs de Sophie), translated from the French of the Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1894) by Honor and Edgar Skinner. These volumes had a little of the Fairchild family spirit; they are full of horrors, which is why I remember them so well. Sophy was a greedy, hot-tempered, disobedient, rash and bold four-year-old, who stole sweets and tormented animals and let her wax doll melt. She was a bad little girl and a bad mother to her doll. Sophy was naughtier than I could think of being. Her worst misfortunes are associated with the disgrace of cutting off the heads of her mother’s goldfish, and drowning her tortoise while trying to give it a bath. I was appalled and frightened by these events, for I would never knowingly have been unkind to animals, and continue to be shocked by the fact that Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss let her brother’s rabbits die. I am surprised these Sophy stories were given to me when I was so little. I was still at East Hardwick when I first read them; the book was presented to me at Christmas 1944, ‘for good progress’, by N. Royston, Head Teacher. I was five years old.

  Is it significant that Miss Royston described herself as Head Teacher, not as headmistress?

  De Ségur’s morality tales were very popular in France. They are part of Georges Perec’s enormous tapestry. Madame Marcia, antique dealer, has a varied collection of wares in her shop, including lubricious animated watches, ‘trinkets, curios, scientific instruments, lamps, jugs, boxes, porcelain, bisque ware, fashion plates, accessory furniture, etc.’, and a clockwork mechanical toy that ‘could have come straight out of Le Bon Petit Diable, that Victorian children’s story-book by the Comtesse de Ségur: a horrible old hag, spanking a little boy’. In de Ségur, in the French style, the sadistic/erotic and the pedagogic meet. In Sherwood, there is no such overt recognition.